March 23, 2008
Obama disses his grandma to save his campaign
Barak Obama gave a speech this past week, trying to put out the fires started by his race-baiting, hate-mongering pastor and spiritual mentor, a twenty-year association that threatens to derail his presidential campaign.
The press loved, loved, LOVED! the speech, with commentators pronouncing it a historic commentary on race that not only healed and uplifted, but cured cancer and ended world hunger, too.
Less often heard in the media accounts was any dissatisfaction at Obama's failure to explain how it was that Oprah Winfrey could quit the church in disgust over the pastor's racist and America-hating diatribes, but Obama was content to merely make excuses.
But for me, the worst part was the way he used his elderly grandmother to further his own political ambitions, comparing something she did long ago to the hate-filled rants delivered by her grandson's mentor.
Mona Charen was also less than impressed.
Discussing his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who asked God to “damn” America, who called this country the “No. 1 killer in the world,” Obama’s defense was subtle. Oh yes, he agreed, the rhetoric is “divisive … at a time when we need unity” and reflects “profoundly distorted views of this country” that “rightly offend both white and black.” ... And Obama can no more “disown him than he can disown the black community” and no more disown him than he can disown his own white grandmother.
Obama’s white grandmother, according to the account in Dreams from My Father, had once flinched before a black man on a public bus — hoping that her husband would drive her to work the following day so that she could avoid him. On other occasions, he recounts, she had uttered “racial or ethnic stereotypes” that made Obama “cringe.”
[...]
And wasn’t it a bit of a cheap shot to take public aim at grandmother, who sacrificed so much for Obama, who served as his surrogate mother during his high school years? If she used racial and ethnic stereotypes, that was wrong. But the episode about the bus, as related in his book, is hardly a damning indictment of a secret racist. After Obama’s grandmother confessed to having been harassed by an aggressive panhandler, Obama writes:
“He (Obama’s grandfather) turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. ‘It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in she told me the fella was black.’ He whispered the word. ‘That’s the real reason she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.’
“It was like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to maintain my composure.”
I don’t claim to know Obama’s grandmother and am in no position to judge her racial sentiments. But it does seem to an outsider that Obama’s judgment upon his grandmother is as harsh as his tolerance of Wright is benign.
It isn’t as if he was raised in Trinity Baptist Church. He chose it as an adult. He chose those sermons he now calls “incendiary” and “inexcusable.” He says now that Wright misses the dynamism of American society, yet when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would “learn” that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would “plant” WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are “fighting the wrong enemy.” A beautifully delivered speech cannot overcome that history.
I find it fascinating that Obama now says he rejects these sermons as inappropriate, their messages too divisive for America, yet he chose to subject his children to the pastor's lunatic sermons.
If the polling coming out of Pennsylvania is accurate, voters aren't buying the hooey he's selling; Hillary Clinton may take the state by a thirty-point margin, padded by Democrats repulsed by what they're hearing about Obama and his spiritual advisor.
Listening to a political roundtable on XM Radio's POTUS '08 channel, I heard a woman call in to say that she'd campaigned for Obama, cast her ballot for him in the primary, but knowing what she knows now, she wishes she'd voted for Hillary instead.
It may be too little, too late, for Clinton's sputtering campaign, but it doesn't portend well for Obama's chances come the general election.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 23, 2008 11:49 PM
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